Gentoo is none of those, although the main "idea" of Gentoo - the compilation - scares a lot of people away. Suffice it to say that I was somewhat against Gento

Gentoo is none of those, although the main "idea" of Gentoo - the compilation - scares a lot of people away. Suffice it to say that I was somewhat against Gentoo until I put it on an old, failing desktop - it absolutely purrs. If you stick with a tiling WM and don't install GNOME/KDE/whatever, the compilation is far from being a persistent problem, and I say this as someone on a usually <1 Mbps Indian internet connection. (Except for Firefox, that is. But you can get a binary package for that.) I do worry about unfixable package management trouble in the future, though...